Individual counseling

What people bring

Often it is something specific: a bereavement, a job that has become unbearable, a relationship that ended, a diagnosis. Sometimes it is vaguer — a sense of being permanently behind, or of having stopped noticing your own life while managing everyone else’s.

Common themes include:

• Anxiety, and the decisions it quietly makes for you
• Low mood that has outlasted its cause
• Grief, including losses that others consider settled
• Life transitions — career, health, family, retirement
• Shame, and the parts of your history you have not said out loud
• Difficulty setting limits with the people closest to you
• Old patterns from childhood that keep showing up in adult life

Inner child work

Laura also offers inner child work: looking at how early experiences and unmet needs still shape the way you react, relate and treat yourself, and learning to respond to those older feelings with more care. Clients who want it can bring mind, body and spirit work into it as well; how much is always your choice. See inner child therapy with Laura, or her guide to inner child work in the Carolinas explains what it is, what the evidence says, and how to start in Charlotte or near Tryon.

How the work goes

Laura is an active participant rather than a silent one. She asks questions, reflects back what she notices, and shares resources when they are genuinely relevant. The direction is yours; she is not working to a curriculum.

Much of individual work turns out to be about accepting the position you are actually in before deciding what to change. That is not resignation. It is usually the thing that makes change possible.

Adults only

Laura works with adults, eighteen and over, at any stage of adult life — from the first years of independence through retirement and beyond.

For anyone under eighteen she is not the right person, and would rather say so on this page than at the end of a first phone call.

Whether it is worth starting

People frequently wait until things are severe, on the grounds that their difficulty is not serious enough to take up a therapist’s time. It is a reasonable instinct and generally a mistake. If something has been on your mind long enough that you are reading this page, that is enough to have a first conversation about.